[BARF ALERT] Chomsky named top intellectual: British poll

[Pendragon_6]

Notorius communist assmite and avowed America hater, Chomsky has flim-flammed the British into thinking he's worthy of some kind of recognition. He's nothing but a commie toad making a big slash in the commie pond scum.___Pendragon
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Oct 18, 2005

Noam Chomsky, the American linguistics expert and US foreign policy critic, was named the world's top public intellectual, according to a new British magazine poll released.

Best known for his loud and consistent criticism of the Vietnam War and US foreign policy over the last 40 years, Chomsky, 76, decisively beat Italian novelist and academic Umberto Eco and third-placed Oxford University professor Richard Dawkins to top the poll.

Now an emeritus professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Chomsky first became known for his theory of grammar developed at MIT in the 1950s, which held that the ability to form structured language is innate in the human mind.

He later became known for his political activism. He published his first collection of political writings in 1969, and has penned over 40 books.

Of 20,000 voters in the Prospect/Foreign Policy poll published this week in Prospect magazine, 4,800 voted for Chomsky to Eco's 2,500.


In Full
Breitbart (http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/10/18/051018152652.77esbn1j.html)

[DeclinetoState]

4,800 out of 20,000 voted for Noam? Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if Al Gore...

Got a few votes
Believes that if all of those who really wanted him to win had been able to figure out how to mark the ballot, he (Gore) in fact would have won.
:D

[Sabbah]

Chomsky is an anarchist not a commie.

You may disagree with his political views (Which revolve around personal freedoms), but its hard to deny his importance to the development of his field...linguistics. I was recently speaking with a friend with a Phd in English lit. She primarily knew him as a linguist and had only had a vague idea of his political leanings.

There are plenty of intelligent people on both the left and the right, people who have opinions that are worthy of respect, or at least consideration, even if you disagree with them. Your dismissal of Chomsky in such purile terms simply shows you are not one of them.

[PaulRevere]

And what part of the Prospect/Foreign Policy poll suggests that the poll recognized Chomsky's 'brilliant linguistics theory' published in the 1950's and not his far left politics?

PS: Anarchy can only lead to totalitarianism, so Chomsky can only be at best a useful idiot of the communists. You know, the ones who persecute intellectuals the day after they get in power? Some intellectual!

[markus3622]

The point is that the poll was to find the most popular "public intellectual". Now, as I see it, a public intellectual is a public figure who is able to write and speak about a range of issues - that rules out a lot of academics who are neither popular nor write about a wide range of topics.

A public intellectual equally doesn't have to be right. If people like Chomsky have encouraged people to think about politics, it is ultimately a good thing. On this basis, he has to be somewhere in the top 10.

[hdmundt]

Whut iz ye' got to did to be one o' them inny-lek-chuls, anyway?
(Other than learnin' to spell.........?)

[Sabbah]

PS: Anarchy can only lead to totalitarianism, so Chomsky can only be at best a useful idiot of the communists. You know, the ones who persecute intellectuals the day after they get in power? Some intellectual!

Hi Paul

I think you may be getting your ideologies mixed up. Anarchy, or anarcho-sydicalism, Chomsky's variant, are about as for from totalitarianism as you can get. In fact one of the main criticisms anarchists have of communism is what you identify above; that is, communism, as defined by Lenin and Trotsky, naturally leads to a Stalinist dictatorship. A brutal dictatorship of the intelligentsia. I tend to agree.

The main charge/criticism of anarchist thought is that it may lead to a kind of feral chaos, or, if you are a communist, you will probably say that it will just lead back to capitalism (in the case of anarcho-syndicalism). These criticisms are just speculation because the only large scale anarchistic experiment we have to look at was Spain, which was crushed by the capitalists and the communists. At that early stage the organisation that had emerged was very democratic.

If you want to find the roots of totalitarianism in modern political systems you have to look at capitalism or communism, which head in that direction through fascism and Stalinism respectively.

The fact remains that Chomsky is no-ones 'useful idiot' and is undoubtedly an extremely important intellectual both in social criticism and linguistics. This is true even though you disagree with his conclusions.

Basically the guy says that you should question authority...Seems like good advice to me.

[Lazarus]

Someone who proposes anarchy as a legitimate social path is neither important nor intellectual... He is a self-absorbed, irresponsible fool... I can only assume that the readers of the magazine in question are the same psuedo-intellectual mutual-admiration socio-snobs...